In which we steal smart comments from smart people.

From a Sadly, No! comments thread:

kingubu said,
August 23, 2009 at 21:12
I just love the one consistent aspect of the winger mentality — simultaneously believing completely contradictory ideas, eg, that libruls are at once wimpy, cowardly terrorist-coddlers and jackbooted, tyrranical, murderous nazis.

According to Eco, that’s a feature not a bug:

When I was a boy I was taught to think of Englishmen as the five-meal people. They ate more frequently than the poor but sober Italians. Jews are rich and help each other through a secret web of mutual assistance. However, the followers of Ur-Fascism must also be convinced that they can overwhelm the enemies. Thus, by a continuous shifting of rhetorical focus, the enemies are at the same time too strong and too weak. Fascist governments are condemned to lose wars because they are constitutionally incapable of objectively evaluating the force of the enemy.

See Also: “Obama is a ruthless pansy-ass elitist thug.”, “Saddam Hussein is a paper tiger whose magical flying drones are poised to dust your home with anthrax.”, “the public option will be so sucky and inefficient it will put private insurers out of business.” etc, etc, ad fucking nauseum.

Oh my. Did I just compare American right-wing ultras to Fascists? How uncivil.